13.4.15

On the way to my fleeting home,
I was attacked by certainty.
Like a wildfire with a wild-fire soul,
A sense of homelesslessness finally came through.

It feels like coming home to grab a beer,
Or like meeting you for the first time with a smile,
The sense of unequivocally falling in mutual love,
And the time I held your hand and felt at home.

Now it's time for me to depart,
For home is where time is now;
More songs will be written and sang for you,
But only as the image of what it was,
Which isn't, but will be.

But better.

"In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we
find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost
committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret
in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your
revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and
Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that
when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent,
we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot
hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it
because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in
our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly
suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a
name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that
had settled the matter....The books or the music in which we thought
the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in
them, it only came through them, and what came through them was
longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good
images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing
itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their
worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent
of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard,
news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying
to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells
are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them."K)